For the Blood Is the Life. Francis Marion Crawford
or two farther he might find some bit of arched bridge across the ditch which would shelter him, or a stone wall; or even perhaps, a farmhouse where he should not be stoned from the door and might be suffered to sleep upon the straw in an outhouse. Such luck as that was rare indeed, and the mere thought of the straw, the pitiful dream that if he could struggle a little farther he might get shelter from the wind and snow, was enough to bring something like a shadowy look of hope into his wretched face. With a great effort he began to walk again, bending low to face the blast, starving, lame, and aching in every bone, but struggling still and peering through the gathering gloom in the vain hope of finding a night's resting-place."
"I would have killed the boy who threw the stone, if I had been you!" exclaimed Lady Brenda in ready sympathy.
"Alas, dear madam, I was dead myself," said Heine. "It was only the other day. Well, as I said, he struggled on; but the end was at hand. The road grew worse, for it had been mended and the small broken stones lay thick together, rough and bristling. He could hardly drag his steps over them. In the darkness he struck his naked foot against one sharp flint that was larger than the rest; he stumbled and with a low cry fell headlong upon the jagged surface. His hands were wounded and the blood trickled from them in the dark, wetting the stones more quickly than did the falling snow; his face, too, had been cut. For some moments he struggled to rise, but he was too weak, too utterly spent; then he rolled upon one side and rested his bruised face upon his torn hands and lay quite still, while the wind howled louder and the snow-flakes fell more thickly upon his rags and his wounds, upon the sorrows of his soul and the pains of his body. One long breath he drew — it was more than an hour since he had fallen.
"God be merciful to me! ' he murmured, and again, ' God be merciful to me, for I think it is the end. And the Angel of the Lord came in the storm and the darkness and touched his forehead; and it was the end. The snow buried him that night and the north wind sang his funeral dirge."
"How terribly sad!" exclaimed Diana in deep sympathy.
"To think that such things happen! " said Lady Brenda and Gwendoline in one breath.
" Do you think it is the fact, or the way the fact is told, which brings the tears to your eyes ? " asked the poet. "If I had stated the fact thus: an old beggar died in a snow-storm; shortly before he died a little boy hit him with a stone — I say, if I put the thing in its simplest expression, would you feel as deep a sympathy ? I believe not. I told you a long story — a true one, if you please — to show you that your sympathy could be commanded, could be excited, by my words. You asked me of a thing concerning myself — I was not willing to state it as a fact, I was obliged to state it with such accessories as should make you feel uncomfortable in my favour, so to say. All of which proves that man, living or dead, is a detestably selfish creature, and not very strong at that. When he has command of his audience he uses it unmercifully to rouse sympathy in others. When his audience has command of him, he generally makes a fool of himself. I once visited Goethe. In half an hour I could find nothing better to say to him than that there were good plums on the road from Jena to Weimar and that I was writing a Faust. I got no applause for my plums and no sympathy for my Faust; I never wrote the Faust, but I never ate plums from that day. So much for knowing how to manage one's hearers."
"I wish you would not talk in that light way, after what you have been telling us so earnestly," said Gwendoline.
"I cannot help it, dear madam," answered Heine.
"I have a particular talent for being easily moved; and when I am moved I shed tears, and when I shed tears it seems very foolish and I at once try to laugh at myself — or at the first convenient object which falls in my way. For tears hurt — bitterly sometimes, and it is best to get rid of them in any way one can, provided that one does not put them beyond one's reach altogether."
"People talk a great deal of sweet pain," remarked Augustus. " I do not understand how anything which hurts can be sweet at the same time."
"Can you understand how a thing sweet at the time may hurt afterwards ? "
"Perfectly," answered Chard.
"Then can you not understand how when the thing hurts it is pleasant to remember that it was once sweet? It is very simple. By no means all pains are sweet, but on the whole there are enough of the sort to supply poets for many years to come. There are men among us here, whose sufferings are bitter still — very bitter."
"Shall we ever know any of your companions ? " asked Lady Brenda.
"They would be delighted, I am sure. We rarely have an opportunity of exchanging words with living people — it has never happened to me before. Mr. Chard has discovered a rather dangerous way of making it possible, and I am delighted to see that you are not in the least nervous. That shows how greatly ideas have changed in thirty years. When I was alive there was something that made one's flesh creep in the idea of talking with a dead man. You have overcome all that. If Mr. Chard will only continue his experiments there is no reason why we dead men should not play a real part in society."
"I see no objection whatever," said Lady Brenda. "I am sure, if they are all like you, it would be most charming. But, after all, you may only be some one who knows all about Heine and talks delightfully about him."
"Will you let me look at your hand?" asked the poet, bending forward and taking Lady Brenda's fingers in his. "What a beautiful ring, I always loved sapphires — "
But Lady Brenda turned pale, and after a moment's struggle with her. convictions she nervously snatched her hand away.
"Oh you are — you are really dead — I can feel it in your fingers," she cried. After that, Lady Brenda ceased to be sceptical.
"There is only one point upon which I must warn you in regard to my friends," resumed Heine, smiling at Lady Brenda's discomfiture. " They wear the dress of their age — as I do. You must trust to them to avoid your servants, who might be surprised — or else you must warn your servants that some friends are coming to stay with you who wear the costumes of their country."
"I will manage that," said Augustus, confidently.
CHAPTER V.
The moon rose higher and higher in the cloudless sky, bathing the terrace in silver and lending in her turn to men the light she borrowed from heaven. For some minutes no one spoke, and it was as though all nature lay in a trance while the visions of heaven passed by. It was the hour when in eastern lands the lotus unfolds its heavy leaves, to take up the wondrous dream broken by the scorching day; it was the hour when in the laurel groves of Italy the nightingale raises her voice in long-drawn weeping for her sister's murdered son, in passionate sorrow for the blood she has shed and can never more wash away; the hour when the mighty dead come forth from their tombs beneath the dark cathedral aisles and kneel before the high altar where the transepts meet the nave, and where the moonbeams from the stained windows of the lofty dome make pools of blood-red light upon the marble floor.
All the party were silent, realising perhaps in that moment the whole beauty of the scene. Heine leaned back in his chair and looked steadily at the moon, resting his elbows on the carved arms of the seat and clasping his delicate white fingers before him.
Suddenly and without the least warning a wonderful strain of music broke the silence. Some one was playing on the piano in the great hall, and through the open windows the sounds floated out to the terrace. No one dared to speak, though all started in surprise. It was a wild Polish mazoure, fitful, passionate and sad, woven in strange movement, now sweeping forward in a burst of fervid hope, full of the rush of the dance, the ring of spurs, the timely measured tread of women's feet, the indescribable grace of slender figures in refined yet rapid motion — the whole breathing a reckless delight in the pleasure of the moment, a defiant power to be glad in the very jaws of death. Then with the contrast of true passion the pace slackens, the melody sways fitfully in the uncertain measure and sadness, waking in the harmony, trembles despairing for one moment in the muffled chords, while even love hardly dares to breathe sweet